Saturday, March 10, 2012

Bubble in Hubble

Bubble nebula using the Hubble palette. Total exposure time is 33 hours.

Finally - I have managed to create an image which is somewhat of a finished product! Sometimes I nearly despair, feeling that I never reach this stage. Instead I fiddle around with calibration, stacking and analysis for weeks and weeks until I start diffusing into other projects, leaving much 'unfinished' work behind me. This morning I got the 'final' stacked, narrowband images of NGC7635 - the Bubble nebula - wrapped up and I vowed to attempt to make something pretty out of it by the end of the day. I chose to use the Hubble palette where SII, H-alpha, OIII are assigned to R,G,B respectively. I also have short exposure length RGB data, but have not yet processed this into something that could be used to create more natural looking stars.

The seeing in this image is ~3.2". It would have been nice to have 2" instead! I have not fallen for the temptation of sharpening and I don't think it would help much.

Earlier today I sent the narrowband images to my good friend, Henrik Bondo, who will attempt to process them into something that has more natural looking colors. So, for many reasons the image shown here is not the final one, after all. We can keep on working on our projects forever - and that's OK!